


The Hart That Mates A Lion

by stuffandnonsense



Series: The Sharing 'Verse [5]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: All the background on Corrine only two readers ever asked for, All the background on Sally no one ever asked for, Angel introspection, Angel is allowed to have nice things alongside his usual angst buffet of doom, Angel's back story, Angel's love life, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27805834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stuffandnonsense/pseuds/stuffandnonsense
Summary: The full backstory for Angel in The Sharing 'Verse that (I think two) dedicated readers asked for.... Ever wondered who Corrine was? Or why Sally and Buffy don't get on? Well, read this and find out.One inside-Angel's-head narrative on his love life and friendship with Spike and Buffy.My Buffyverse Bingo submission for 'free space'. Insert your own pun....
Relationships: Angel & Spike & Buffy Summers, Angel/Original Female Character(s), Spike/Buffy Summers
Series: The Sharing 'Verse [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1127618
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Buffyverse Bingo





	The Hart That Mates A Lion

**Author's Note:**

> Possibly the first thing I've ever written without dialogue. Let me know what you think.
> 
> Title is yet another garbled quote from Willy Wobbledagger's All's Well That Ends Well.

If you’d told Angel that Buffy and Spike would come visit him in LA for a mid-week ‘long weekend’ very nearly every month, he would have—

Buffy would say he’d get that look on his face like someone shoved one lemon in his mouth and another one up his—

Spike would have chosen a more violent analogy, but it’d be funnier.

Angel would never have believed anyone who told him, is the point.

He and Spike built a fragile truce – an alliance – over the three years they were living in each other’s pockets in LA. That first year was pretty awful, no arguments either way. But then they went through nearly six months of physical recovery when they’d _had_ to depend on each other, because anyone Angel hadn’t already burned his bridges with by joining Wolfram and Hart died in that final battle, and ditto anyone (useful) who knew Spike was alive in the first place. Or at least so they thought at the time: Charles Gunn turning up undead on the one-year anniversary was neither more nor less than a miracle.

The eighteen months post-recovery brought them … kinship? Something like the fractious odd-couple relationship buddy movies seemed to like so much. But Spike wasn’t built to stay in one place too long. Once, Angel would have said he was the same, but there was just something about LA that called to him. Even if it still stank like burning tires and death to anyone with their heightened senses. Plus, Corrine was there, and he hadn’t been willing to do anything that might stunt their fragile new acquaintanceship from blossoming into something more.

Spike hadn’t even been gone from LA a month before suggesting he come back for a visit. He’d decided that Arizona was not for him (although certain Arizona residents might have argued it was the other way around) and was mostly living out of his car. Whereas Angel had a place with locks on the doors and a functional roof (a genuine achievement for LA at the time), so it made more sense for Spike to head back there than for Angel to stay in whichever hotel (motel, if he was honest about budget) was nearest to where Spike happened to be parked.

Angel very nearly bit Spike’s hand off at the offer, which still shocked him all these years later. They’d both been quick enough at the time to reassure themselves that it wasn’t a case of missing each other or anything like that. That was still … too soon. But they had been ready to acknowledge the value of the relationship they’d rediscovered (or, in more honest moments, created for the first time). Family still meant something, to both of them. And the thought of going decades without contact – or worse, slipping back into the easy familiarity of hating each other – it was … unattractive. Spike would probably have some evocative simile or metaphor for that, probably involving body parts because he was crude like that.

Over that first year of Spike wandering up and down the continent building up his security business, they figured out three nights was the right length of time for a visit. Anything less felt rushed, but if it went on much longer, their dynamic tended to devolve from genial sniping into harder-edged bickering, before finally erupting into outright violence. Angel’s left knee still twinged when it rained from that one time Spike refused to drive back to Florida until he’d stayed the whole week. Stubborn asshole. After that, every time Spike circled outside reasonable driving distance of LA, they spread it out – only seeing each other a few hours a day over a week or two – but that got expensive fast, and the whole point was to spend real time together, not the odd few hours here or there they could have just as easily had over the phone.

To their surprise, it worked. Worked better, even, than when they’d been living and working together in the same city – something neither one of them had ever bothered hoping for. Somehow, without meaning to, they became true friends. Neither of them had much experience with that, so they fucked it up fairly regularly. But forgiving got easier the more they practiced, until most of the words and habits that used to cut deep and fester worse became almost in-jokes. After a few years, they even harangued each other when it got too long between visits.

They got even closer after Spike settled in San Francisco. He still wouldn’t admit the reason he’d moved in the first place was to be nearer Buffy. But the very long, very involved, cock and bull story about why that absolutely, definitely, was not the case had become so intricate and involved over the years it was almost as good as admitting it. Angel hoped Spike at least admitted it to her.

Angel himself had barely seen Buffy between her last stand in Sunnydale and the first time Spike brought her along for a visit. She made it very clear she wanted nothing to do with him while he was working for Wolfram and Hart, and then she’d been so incandescently angry about Spike surviving and not telling her, she’d cut off all contact again ‘to avoid staking them both’. It was okay. She deserved to have the distance if that was what she wanted, and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere. In the meantime, Spike visited pretty regularly, and Angel had Corrine. There was nothing in this world or any other that hadn’t been better and easier with her around.

By the time Spike and Buffy’s coffee dates no longer needed third party supervision, she was also ready to admit interest in what Angel was up to. Besides which, she and Corrine had a lot of mutual friends who were terrible, terrible gossips and told you everything about everyone, whether you wanted to know or not. Angel had been trying, unsuccessfully, to forget everything he’d been told about Willow’s sex life for years. It was _fascinating_ , sure, but it also included way more detail than either of them would be comfortable with, should Willow ever find out what he knew. Corrine used to put her hands over his ears when the other witches came to visit, for all the good that did. He was still afraid to ask what they’d told Buffy about him. There were knowing smiles he’d long ago decided he never needed to hear more about.

It was supposed to be a one-off, Buffy coming to visit. She needed to get to LA, too – Angel knew why once, but it wasn’t interesting or important enough to remember anymore – and she and Spike decided to share the driving. She was going to drop him off at Angel and Corrine’s place, maybe stay for a quick chat, then pick him up again when she was ready to drive back. Except then Buffy and Corrine discovered they got along better than an arsonist and gasoline. At three am, Spike officially moved to the couch and Buffy cancelled her hotel reservation. She only just managed to cram in her errands before it was time to leave again.

To Angel’s delight, the four of them somehow just clicked. The dynamics were textbook sitcom cringe, particularly since Buffy and Spike were Very Definitely Not Dating, and Corrine was the only one of them who hadn’t slept with everybody else. Buffy, thank god, had the sense never to try to bring any of her boyfriends along, although Angel suspected that was Corrine’s doing. Buffy wasn’t exactly the most self-aware person.

If they’d been the sort of people who took beach vacations, they absolutely would have had a joint timeshare somewhere. It should never have worked as well as it did, but somehow Angel ended up getting precious years with three of the people he cared about most. Those memories were priceless, and there wasn’t a day he didn’t wonder how in the hell he’d convinced the Powers That Be he deserved them.

When Corrine…. Well, by then it was enough of a ritual for the four of them to spend time together that when Angel was very obviously not coping with planning the funeral, Buffy and Spike moved in for a month to look after him. He’d thought, at the time, he was doing okay, but with time and distance he could finally recognise that particular delusion as yet another sign of how bad it really was. Angel’s memories of that time were more fragmented than the weeks he’d spent drugged to the gills and re-growing muscle and skin after being burnt to the bone by a dragon.

Thinking back, they might have stayed longer than a month.

He was pretty sure that it took two months of twice-a-month spot-checks, and him moving into a new (studio) apartment, before his friends relaxed enough to stop sleeping in shifts when they visited, and then, after another month, to finally trust him enough to sleep on real beds at the nearest hotel instead of on his floor.

The new apartment hurt just as much from Corrine’s absence as the old one did from her memory, but by the time he’d moved, Angel was able to cope on the worst days – or at least, he could reliably hide that he couldn’t. He hoped all that time Spike and Buffy spent with him in LA was a factor in them finally getting over themselves and admitting they were a couple. Corrine would’ve liked that she brought them together as lovers as well as friends.

The dynamic really changed once Angel met Sally. He had not been looking for another relationship. In fact, he’d pretty much resigned himself to never having one again. But they’d started talking about grief one day in Angel’s therapist’s waiting room, and before he knew what he was doing, he found himself suggesting they keep going over coffee. It was weeks before he realised that Sally – whose husband died in the Madrid train bombing of 2004 – was also Dr Doherty, the human partner in the clinic. She still thought that was hilarious.

The DD Clinic (jokingly called Dungeons and Dragons by everyone who knew it) was one of many specialist trauma and grief clinics that sprang up to help LA cope with the aftermath of war, but one of the very few that was still there post-reconstruction. Angel chose it because Doctor Dave (the demon partner) was a T’qn’q who claimed to be able to read strong emotions off of vampires, and Angel didn’t trust himself to be honest otherwise. But he’d also been intrigued by what was on their website about Dr No-First-Name-or-gender-markers Doherty. Dr Doherty specialised in helping all-too-human monsters make peace with themselves and with their communities. She’d worked mostly in Belfast, but also spent a few years in the former Yugoslavia post-Kosovo, and from the rest of her resumé, it looked like she’d travelled for consults whenever anyone asked for one.

Like Angel, she’d run away to LA to escape her problems and stayed. She would never be Corrine, just like he would never be John, and they both knew that, but it was okay. There were times it felt like all four of them existed in one weird polyamorous arrangement only Willow should have been able to think up. But that was okay, too. Although he hated that Sally got to say ‘my husband’ and Angel could never quantify what Corrine was to him. ‘Girlfriend’ would always mean Buffy at seventeen. ‘Lover’ was not a word he could bring himself to use anymore. ‘Partner’ was so strongly associated with Cordy and Wes and Angel Investigations it felt odd and uncomfortable to use it in another context. Corrine had never been his wife. Never would be, now. But she had been his, and he had been hers, and he wished he’d done something – anything – different so that he didn’t have to explain that you couldn’t just get over someone like Corrine when they—

You just couldn’t.

Buffy found it difficult that Angel was seeing _anyone_ , but Spike understood it better. Or maybe he just understood Angel better. Most of their mutual friends thought Spike was the one who couldn’t handle being alone – that he was some kind of obsessive people-pleaser who’d choose clinical co-dependency over thirty seconds alone in his own head. (Buffy knew better, thank goodness.) But Spike had always been a reflective type, for all he liked to pretend he was bored to tears by any kind of planning. If you really wanted to knock him off-kilter, your best bet was always forcing him to react to something important without being able to think it through first. Dru did that a lot – Angel had always suspected on purpose – and he could never figure out why Spike put up with it.

Angel, on the other hand, needed other people around him to function – an audience to please or piss off – or else he lost track of who he was and what he was doing. Trying to go solitary, cold-turkey, was how he’d ended up eating rats and living in sewers. Trying it again in Sunnydale had ended up with an attempt at suicide that had no earthly right to be abortive. It still embarrassed him he’d let it get that bad inside his head.

Spike had never struggled to live on his own. He might not like it much, but he could at least do it without having a full-on psychotic break. He even broke up with the love of his life with nothing worse than getting black-out drunk a lot and falling in love with his mortal enemy, which ended up being the best option for everyone. He hadn’t felt the need to keep on killing Dru over and over, like Angel had with Darla.

Darla … he’d told more lies about to himself about that woman than he’d spilled drops of blood in his long life. Spike and Dru’d had regular breaks from each other over the decades – whereas Angel was incapable of letting go gracefully, and Darla knew it. Every time he or she needed a little space, it’d been triggered by one leaving the other to die. Immediately after the soul, he’d been ready to promise anything if only she’d let him stay with her. Anything except eating babies, which was why she’d asked for it. Staking her to save Buffy had very nearly driven Angel to greet the sunrise the next morning, just like every other time he’d given her up to save himself. He’d been so relieved when she came back human, he’d convinced himself he was dreaming, even though his dreams had never evolved to include vampire senses so he’d always known absolutely by her scent that she was real. He’d set fire to a building with her, Dru, and a whole bunch of lawyers inside it, just to avoid having to tell her he wanted her out of his life. Because he hadn’t, not really, and he couldn’t trust himself to lie well enough for her (or anyone else) to believe him. It had very nearly broken him when having her back was revealed not to be a perfect moment of happiness.

It should never have taken him as long as it had to realise that only someone you really, truly, loved could do the things Darla did to his head. On the rare occasions he saw Connor, Angel saw Darla, too. He still hadn’t worked out whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, no matter what Spike said. He loved so much easier than Angel ever had.

Even before Corrine and, later, therapy taught Angel how to build a support network, he’d mostly learned not to let his head get that ugly again. Gunn disagreed – claimed that the battle in LA was yet another suicide attempt. But Spike hadn’t picked a side yet on that argument – and it was a very, very long-running argument now – which gave Angel a certain amount of hope. He still surprised himself by how often he reached for suicide as a solution, especially given he’d been raised Catholic. That was another thing Sally laughed about. With him. Like he laughed with her drinking.

Angel loved Darla, but she only ever wanted his power and his violence, even when she’d been pregnant and soulful. Angel loved Corrine, and she’d not only given him the great gift of seeing and believing in the best possible version of himself, she could also accept him at his worst. But she could never have lived with that worst self, and Angel could never have wished that on her.

Sally would never lift him to the dizzy heights of Champion of the Powers That Be, something he’d once aspired to become more than he’d wanted to survive. (Both Gunn and Spike would say that had always been his biggest problem.) That was beginning to matter less, though it wasn’t gone yet. For the first time since 1898 Angel could imagine a relationship in which his soul was irrelevant. He wouldn’t have believed it was possible until Gunn came back.

Angel had an even keel with Sally that he’d never, ever, experienced before. He suspected that, if he’d ever paid attention to it, he would have seen something similar between Spike and Buffy. Sally stood beside him in his grief and his joy, his cruelty and kindness, and it was still him and still her, and it was okay. Angel was learning to live with himself in a way he didn’t think he could ever have achieved without the gift of several hundred extra years of life to learn how to live in the world. And not without Sally.

 _Of course_ he wanted to learn from his mistakes with Corrine, to have a word for what he and Sally had that went beyond the casual descriptors strangers kept assigning them. _Of course_ he did. Even though John was Sally’s husband, and probably always would be. And even though he’d never wanted to call anyone but Corrine ‘my wife’.

A claddagh ring seemed like the right sort of compromise. Something that meant ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ without invoking holy matrimony (because for Sally, it was still holy, for all that she shared her life and her bed with a demon). It had also become so hokey a love token that they could dress it down if ever they needed to. (Angel was embarrassed on his past self’s behalf for failing entirely to understand what it had become between the time he was a living, breathing, man and the day he’d given one to Buffy.)

The easy part was offering it up to Sally. The hard part was telling his friends that he’d done it. Gunn was the trial run, because although he was a close friend, he wasn’t Spike or Buffy. Angel was, quite frankly, terrified of their reactions. Not because he thought they’d be mean about it – he’d gone way past that point with both of them – but because he wasn’t sure they’d approve. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but….

It didn’t help that Sally adored Spike and (at best) tolerated Buffy. Angel found it frustrating, because as far as he could tell, they should’ve got along like a house on fire. Their senses of humour were so similar Angel found it eerie at first – and everyone who knew both of them agreed, including Spike!

But when he’d first started dating Sally, Buffy began finding reasons to stay home, and there were a few months that Spike visited on his own more often than not. Then, once she and Spike finally gave into the inevitable (about damn time!), staying home on her own became less attractive than putting up with all the things she didn’t like about spending time with Sally. Sally sucked it up as best she could, but Angel knew that by the end of each visit from the both of them she was counting the minutes. It wasn’t anywhere near easy yet, and it probably wouldn’t ever be as good as it had been with Corrine. Angel still held out hope it’d improve.

When Angel and Sally moved in together a few months ago, they got a place with a spare room. He’d had visions of Spike and Buffy starting to stay with him again. But by then, the precedent was long set whereby they showed they trusted him by not actually watching his every single move while they were there, and that meant going somewhere else to sleep. There was a nice B&B that was theoretically walking distance (not that Angel had ever walked), and Buffy and Spike stayed there. In retrospect, Angel was glad it worked out that way – he didn’t need to be able to hear or smell whatever they got up to in a bedroom.

When Spike texted the days they’d be down, Angel texted back that he and Sally had an announcement to make. Spike’s immediate reaction was to congratulate him on his pregnancy, claiming he’d wondered whether there’d been a bit more belly that last visit. But he hadn’t pressed. Spike was good like that.

Angel knew they’d drop off their stuff and go out for a meal before showing up for whatever Sally cooked or Angel ordered in. Buffy, for some reason, had a bit of a thing about eating slayerly portions in front of Sally, and Spike had a thing about listening to Buffy’s stomach growl all evening, for which the compromise was a ‘secret’ first dinner that everybody knew about but no one ever mentioned. Whatever made them happy, quite frankly, but Angel could have done without the extra hour of waiting.

He wanted so much for them to be happy for him.


End file.
